


I'm Here to Listen, If You're Here to Heal

by parsnips (trifles)



Series: Tumblr Treasures [28]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bad Therapy, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Natasha Romanoff - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 03:08:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20333047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trifles/pseuds/parsnips
Summary: For the "disparate things" fic challenge:Natasha and therapy.





	I'm Here to Listen, If You're Here to Heal

“When I was a little girl,” Natasha said, a little hesitant, her eyes drifting to a spot by the door instead of looking at me, “I… sometimes didn’t sleep very well.”

“Oh?” I said. I kept my voice light. “A lot of us don’t.” Natasha’s mouth tightened, and then relaxed just as quickly again. Anger. Which was, of course, just another form of fear. I was starting to learn her tells. “In what way did you not sleep well?”

Every session, I offered her the basket of objects that she could worry at if she needed something to do with her hands. She had refused them for weeks, but two sessions ago, her fingers had drifted toward a beaded necklace, and now it hung stretched between her hands, a half-made cat’s cradle that she formed and re-formed over and over as we talked. It was progress. It meant we were finally getting into the meat of her issues.

The beads clicked between her fingers. “I had a— foster family,” Natasha said. She darted a look at me. “Did you know that?”

In all the weeks we’d been seeing one another, she’d never hinted at such a thing. Perhaps we were truly at a breakthrough. My supervisors would be pleased. “No, I didn’t,” I said. “Were you hiding it?”

She shrugged and looked away again. Click click click. “I hide a lot of things. Everybody does. You have to hide to survive, right? Lie to strangers so they don’t look too close?”

I didn’t lean forward, though I wanted to. I had to seem as unthreatening as possible. “Was there something you needed to hide from people? Something about your foster family?”

“My foster family,” she said, letting the words drift off, her eyes become unfocused. She dropped the cradle in her hands, started to form it again without looking. “Have you ever had to— to do something that wasn’t really right? That would maybe hurt people? Even if you…” Click click click. “Even if you didn’t want to?”

She did not seem to realize that there were tears clinging to her lashes.

She was broken.

This was the crisis point. This was what we had been building toward. I had gained her trust — but she was the Black Widow. She would know if I was lying.

She was mine, as long as I told her the truth.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’ve done a lot of things that other people might think are wrong. I started as an adult. You started as a child. Because you didn’t have a — let’s say standard — childhood, it means that sometimes you get confused about what right and wrong really mean. Part of what you and I can do in therapy is learn to accept that other people will know what the right thing is, even if you don’t. That the things you worry are wrong, aren’t. The things you think you don’t want to do… Natasha, they’re okay. They’re all okay. I can help you. I’ll help you understand, even when you don’t.”

Slowly, I leaned over and put my hand over the beaded strands between her fingers. A cat’s cradle. Or, in another light, a little web, for a little spider that couldn’t see the larger one behind it.

She looked up into my face, her eyes wide and child-like and scared. “What should I do?” she whispered. “What’s the right thing? My family taught me, they taught me…”

“Captain America might be a good place to start,” I said gently. “A good first target. And then you can come back to me, and we can talk about how it made you feel, all right?”

“How I feel,” she said. The beads, still beneath my hand, shifted slightly. Her face closed off. Her head tilted. Her eyes became diamond hard. “So it’s Steve you’re after.”

The necklace twisted over my wrist, and she stood, throwing herself sideways — I screamed as I felt my arm pull from its socket. I fell hard, gasping, and felt her slither closer. She braced the back of my head against her thigh and wrapped the beads tight around my neck, digging them into my flesh, ignoring the scrape of my one good hand as I tried to rake her face and then, feebly, pull away the string driving me toward darkness.

Nothing worked. I couldn’t breathe. The last thing I heard was her saying, very calmly, “Thank you for your assistance.”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](https://tmblr.co/ZQjLyx1hRadt_).


End file.
